Street Fight Daily: Ebay Tests Deals, CitySearch Announces Layoffs
A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.
EBay Tests Deals on Services, Takes on Groupon (Reuters)
EBay has been quietly testing an online marketplace for deals on local services, expanding into a multibillion- dollar market currently led by Groupon Inc. EBay has teamed up with start-up Signpost, which arranges the deals with local merchants and posts them on a new section of eBay’s online marketplace.
Shrink To Grow: Citysearch And Urbanspoon Parent Company CityGrid Lays Off 15% Of Its Employees (TechCrunch)
Online media and advertising company CityGrid, the parent company of properties like Urbanspoon, Citysearch and Insider Pages, is announcing a round of layoffs today that will affect about 15% of its workforce. CityGrid CEO Jason Finger says the reason for the layoffs is a general shift from cost-per-click (CPC) advertising in the local space to a subscription-based and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) model.
DNAinfo, In Bid to Raise Profile Among Local Advertisers, Starts ‘Small Business Insider’ (Capital New York)
DNAinfo New York, the online neighborhood news behemoth bankrolled by billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, is trying to raise its profile among the small businesses it depends upon as advertisers with the launch of a new video series profiling local entrepreneurs. “Small Business Insider,” which launched today, is “a premium video series that highlights the city’s most innovative and unique neighborhood businesses,” according to a press release.
SoLoMo Update: Mobile-Only Social Networks To Reach 1B Users By 2014, 800M Users Of Foursquare + Other Location Services This Year (TechCrunch)
While Facebook and Twitter continue to make ever more inroads into mobile, the so-called pure-play mobile social networks — think Path, Instagram, Foursquare, Mocospace and networks from China like Mobile QQ here — will also continue to gain ground, if also with a bit of consolidation: there will only be about 4-5 players worth noting by 2015, Gartner says. It doesn’t reveal a user number for 2015, but does note location-based services will be generating revenues of $13.5 billion by that time, driven by navigation and location search, as well as friend-finding apps that link into social networking features.
Groupon Still Hungry for Start-Up Deals (Wall Street Journal)
Groupon bought eight venture-backed companies in first nine months of this year, making it the most active acquirer of them, surpassing Facebook, which bought six, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. The companies had about 20 or fewer employees and the prices paid weren’t disclosed.
You Probably Forgot That Old Tweet—but Advertisers Haven’t (AdWeek)
Three months ago LocalResponse began testing the ability toturn back the clock on the social data it used to target ads, and on Wednesday it officially rolled out historical intent targeting. LocalResponse has partnered with social data platform Datasift—one of three Twitter-certified data providers—to access historical tweets, which LocalResponse then mines for signals of intent to be used to target desktop and mobile display ads.
Get Street Fight Daily in your inbox! Subscribe to our newsletter.
Street Fight Summit 2012 is coming in just THREE weeks. Join top hyperlocal industry executives in New York on October 30th and 31st. Buy your ticket today!